IEEE NETWORK MAGAZINE

       Special Issue on Active and Programmable Networks


Guest Editors:

Thomas M. Chen			Alden W. Jackson
GTE Laboratories		BBN Systems and Technologies
40 Sylvan Road			10 Moulton Street
Waltham, MA 02254		Cambridge, MA 02138
tel: 617-466-2758		tel: 617-873-2126
fax: 617-890-9320		fax: 617-873-6091
email: tchen@gte.com		email: awjacks@bbn.com


Scope: While network infrastructure technologies have been improving
rapidly and steadily, the evolution of network services has been much
slower, constrained by standardization processes.  Standardization of
protocols ensures that different equipment can interoperate, of
course, but relies on the slow process of general consensus.  In
addition, network management and control have not progressed much
beyond proprietary implementations of simple polling systems.

New networking concepts, building on recent advances in mobile
software, have been proposed with the purposes of accelerating
services and enhancing network management. An active network can give
a high degree of control to users to customize their network services
dynamically.  Users can in effect "program" their services by
injecting mobile programs in special packets that are executed at
network elements.  These mobile programs can carry out management and
control functions as well, without the need for pre-programming
network elements.  Such software-intensive networks rely on agreement
on a basic instruction set or primitives rather than consensus on
specific protocols and services.

The gained flexibility in control raises fundamental issues of
security, safety, manageability and resource allocation.  Users can be
given direct control over network resources, but control must be
limited to prevent negative effects on other users.  New models of
network elements are needed to understand the security and resource
allocation issues.

This special issue of IEEE Network will present an overview of
research in this area which is still in the early stages.  Tutorially
oriented reference or original contributions related to the following
topics are solicited:

 (1) Active network concepts and architectures
 (2) Languages for mobile programs
 (3) User customization of services
 (4) Models of programmable network elements
 (5) Applications for network management and control
 (6) Security and resource allocation issues
 (7) Management of active networks


Authors are invited to submit hardcopies or electronic files of their
papers to tchen@gte.com.  Papers should not exceed twenty double spaced
pages in length, excluding figures and diagrams.  More information for
potential authors is available at the IEEE Network Home Page
(http://www.comsoc.org/socstr/techcom/ntwrk/).



Schedule:

 - paper submission deadline: November 10, 1997
 - notification of acceptance:  February 1, 1998
 - final manuscripts due:  May 1, 1998
 - publication date: July/August 1998